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I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

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Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#41

Post by londons_explore »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #37
oriesdan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, Kiwix is the proper solution for anyone who cares about knowledge access in places where internet connection is spotty. Given the file format it uses (zim) is compressed, and meant to be accessed compressed to pluck a specific article, you can have all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB. Plus, the specs of the file format are published and it's easy to build your own imp…

> all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB 36GB seems like a really big number if it's just text. A cursory Google search says 1MB will hold about 500 pages of text (ignoring compression). So 36GB would be something like 18 million pages? Let's say a 1000 page book is 10cm wide, so 18M pages wind up as 1800 meters of books, or 180 meter-wide bookshelves with 10 shelves each, which…

The zim file format is far from ideal for compression efficiency - all the best algorithms typically don't allow random access without decompressing everything.

Also, wikipedia has a lot of spam and orphan pages, insanely long lists, etc. Those are hard to algorithmically filter out.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#42

Post by noisy_boy »

I spent a whole lot of time in my collage reading random articles from the hardbound volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica. That was the first exposure I had to high-quality information about the world on an incredible variety of topics. It was such a great feeling sitting in a beautiful library surrounded by books in silence isolated from the chaotic and noisy world outside.

I get that now all information we can possibly want is at out fingertips, but there is something to be said about properly curated information in a defined boundary, in both physical and metaphorical sense, that you can focus on without getting distracted by the next random video.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#43

Post by patrec »

p1necone wrote: post #19
jxf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the value of Encarta was in the human curation of what was interesting. Wikipedia includes (by necessity) everything — but an encyclopedia would probably devote more space to (say) Nigerian history than to (say) the in-game statistics of all ~1,000 Pokémon.

I suspect the sort of person who writes Wikipedia articles about Pokemon would not go and write articles about Nigerian history instead if Pokemon articles were not allowed, and vice versa. Wikipedia contributions are not really a zero sum game.

Well, for storage (and thus offline) purposes it is of course exactly a zero sum game. I for one would really like a say 3 GiB version of English Wikipedia without Pokemon and Porn, or a 33GiB version with useful images.

However broad and non-deltionist might be best for online Wikepedia, a more curated i.e. deletionist version would certainly be very useful for offline usage and quite a few other purposes.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#44

Post by quietbritishjim »

p1necone wrote: post #19
jxf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the value of Encarta was in the human curation of what was interesting. Wikipedia includes (by necessity) everything — but an encyclopedia would probably devote more space to (say) Nigerian history than to (say) the in-game statistics of all ~1,000 Pokémon.

I suspect the sort of person who writes Wikipedia articles about Pokemon would not go and write articles about Nigerian history instead if Pokemon articles were not allowed, and vice versa. Wikipedia contributions are not really a zero sum game.

I think the point was that if you are looking at a subject where the relative importance is less obvious than Pokemon vs Nigerian politics then you could gauge importance implicitly from the existence of the article in a curated encyclopedia - not that contributers should be forced to spend more time on more important topics.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#45

Post by tannhaeuser »

kar1181 wrote: post #30

That whole period of the PC industry where 'multimedia' became mainstream was pretty magical. I know the Amiga was well ahead of the PC ecosystem for a long time in capability but it never hit schools (at least where I grew up in South Australia) like PCs did. So with the emergence of VGA and Super VGA, widespread availability (and relative affordability) of 486 DX class PCs, Soundblasters and Optical Drives, the PC…

Yes. Also, the Encarta world map on CD I had was desirable enough to swap for a Pentium (120 or 133 MHz I believe) and some rare original IBM PC-AT chassis parts (; Encarta was an early pre-Web hypertext system from the 1992/3 multimedia/HyTime-esque era that wouldn't look bad even today. Some insiders here to share some tech internals?

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#46

Post by vkaku »

I don't know if people noticed, but: https://archive.org/search.php?query=Encarta+2009 gives you links to try it out.

I loved Encarta, was so much more interactive and great for children to learn from, without getting mixed up with Wikipedia's problems with political and biased edits and such. I really wish they brought this back.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#49

Post by bawolff »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #37
oriesdan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, Kiwix is the proper solution for anyone who cares about knowledge access in places where internet connection is spotty. Given the file format it uses (zim) is compressed, and meant to be accessed compressed to pluck a specific article, you can have all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB. Plus, the specs of the file format are published and it's easy to build your own imp…

> all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB 36GB seems like a really big number if it's just text. A cursory Google search says 1MB will hold about 500 pages of text (ignoring compression). So 36GB would be something like 18 million pages? Let's say a 1000 page book is 10cm wide, so 18M pages wind up as 1800 meters of books, or 180 meter-wide bookshelves with 10 shelves each, which…

Wikipedia (english) currently has about 6.2 million pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#50

Post by watermanio »

martin_a wrote: post #5

I remember we had something like "Encarta 98" (was that a thing?) on my dads computer. It was a family computer and my brother and me were sitting in front of it, watching videos and reading all the stuff in there and whatnot. I always dreamed that school was like this. Hasn't happened until today, which is sad.

My Dad was too cheap for Encarta. We had a shareware version called something like Infopedia. I remember doing a homework project at a friend's house and being quite jealous of the proper version!
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